Abortion

"No credible research" means it hasn't been shown to be a thing. You don't refute things that are non-existent. That's not how the scientific method works.

Person A writes a shoddy paper and says "My conclusions show X".

Person B reviews the research, says "This is shit" and discards it. If the research is no good, you don't waste time on it further.

If Person B saw the research and thought it had merit, the response would be "This must be independently confirmed" and further inquiry would be made to either prove or disprove the previous conclusions. Then the cycle starts over. It isn't on someone to disprove post-abortion syndrome. First the people who claim it's a real thing need to actually show that their ideas have merit, and so far they haven't.

I'm fairly sure that a_skeleton_03 was just being his douchey self and was purposely misrepresenting the topic, but the above post is a great explanation.

That's now how research works, a_skeleton_03. I explained it above. If that's not sufficient for you, then I'm very sorry.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

This is a very interesting article.

They still are having too hard of a time getting a control group and I can understand that. Their information is quite interesting.

It is a long read.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/ma...abortions.html

Click to expand...

usual NYTimes pro-abortion bullshit.

Most studies on the effects of abortion compare women who have abortions with those who choose to carry their pregnancies to term. It is like comparing people who are divorced with people who stay married, instead of people who get the divorce they want with the people who don't. Foster saw this as a fundamental flaw. By choosing the right comparison groups - women who obtain abortions just before the gestational deadline versus women who miss that deadline and are turned away - Foster hoped to paint a more accurate picture.

Click to expand...

Foster's study, by contrast, seeks to isolate the impact of abortion by comparing two groups of very similar women: there are few differences in their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and they all sought an abortion....Foster hoped that their similarities would allow her to answer more fully how abortion affects women's mental health and emotional states.

Click to expand...

Classic baby killing bullshit. Don't like the results of a resonable test, fuck around until you come up with something that will get you the answers you are seeking. How the fuck is comparing woman who have abortions with those who don't anything at all like comparing people who are divorced with people who stay married? How does limiting your study to a very small group of women who have had abortions allow you to 'answer more fully' how it affects women's mental health.

I may be only in Intro to Pro-Abortion Sophistry but even I can see the whole point of this study is to justify Gosnell-like late term abortions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=T87FIhTdu8o

You want your population to be as homogeneous as possible because it helps you isolate the data you're looking to collect. It's research 101, and is a fairly high burden for most research grants to overcome. It really comes down to how the project is designed, whether it's exploratory or practical application, etc. There's a lot of different things that go into determining who your study population is going to be.

When it says she wants to isolate the impact of the abortion, that's what she's attempting to do by ruling out women who chose to carry a child to term before facing that decision. The abortion itself may not be the stressor, but rather all the other details alongside it. If you see the same sorts of behavior in women who wanted an abortion and got one as well as women who wanted an abortion but didn't, that tells you something different than comparing women who chose abortions to women who never considered the option.

It's not sophistry, it's science.

Heylel_sl said:

It's not sophistry, it's science.

Click to expand...

Nope. The number of women who get abortions is very large (somethng like a million plus a year IIRC) the number of women who seek abortions but who are unable to get them is very small by comparision. Yet she's going to compare the two as if they're equivalent.

She's trying to spike the data by using a outlier subset of women who didn't have abortions. If you think anything else is going on here you haven't been following pro-abortion "science" for the past 30 years.

Heylel_sl said:

You want your population to be as homogeneous as possible because it helps you isolate the data you're looking to collect. It's research 101, and is a fairly high burden for most research grants to overcome. It really comes down to how the project is designed, whether it's exploratory or practical application, etc. There's a lot of different things that go into determining who your study population is going to be.

When it says she wants to isolate the impact of the abortion, that's what she's attempting to do by ruling out women who chose to carry a child to term before facing that decision. The abortion itself may not be the stressor, but rather all the other details alongside it. If you see the same sorts of behavior in women who wanted an abortion and got one as well as women who wanted an abortion but didn't, that tells you something different than comparing women who chose abortions to women who never considered the option.

It's not sophistry, it's science.

Click to expand...

It really doesn't tell you much of anything useful beyond the assumptions of the study. I wouldn't call it complete sophistry either but I would personally discriminate between a scientific approach to answering a social question and science.

It is not a tool that lends itself easily to the subject matter. There's a reason social sciences are sometimes called soft sciences, and it's not derogatory.

Iannis_sl said:

It is not a tool that lends itself easily to the subject matter. There's a reason social sciences are sometimes called soft sciences, and it's not derogatory.

Click to expand...

I'm just speaking as a researcher to how those methods are arrived at. You can call them soft sciences all day long, but I know what the standards are for data validation in research at that level. I'll trust the researcher over tad.

Heylel_sl said:

I'm just speaking as a researcher to how those methods are arrived at. You can call them soft sciences all day long, but I know what the standards are for data validation in research at that level. I'll trust the researcher over tad.

Click to expand...

Dude, the "researcher" has already figure out what result she wants and is just manipulating data and study populations to achieve that desired result, but feel free to trust her (but she gives it away in the closing sentence of the article). The entire article is a pro-abortion propaganda piece that focuses on all the horrible effects of having a child and how great it was to have an abortion.

Well that's fair. It really is. I'm not shitting on methodology. But a problem occurs when trying to abstract objective trends from highly subjective data. It always does. That problem is not limited to "soft" social sciences. "Hard" science overcomes the issue through self-validation because they can inarguably and empircally prove/disprove those theories. You study this exact same issue next year or five years from now or you study it concurrently in a different area and your results will vary. They are subjective in that way. It's just the subject matter itself. And again that's not a flaw that's the nature of the beast, but it is kind of a problem when trying to move from specific discovery to non-specific application.

It only tells you what it tells you, imho. A person shouldn't extrapolate on this sort of thing. It's just dishonest. There's a lot of appeal to authority that surrounds this sort of thing and that's what I don't like.

But sure, by itself there's nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all. It's worth doing.